celticman's blog

Anne Michaels’ collections of poetry have won a shedload of international prizes, but as any literary agent knows, there’s no money in poetry. Poets that write prose tend to be good at the small things that make the larger things. This is quite a simple story of love lost and found. Jean loves Avery. Avery loves Jean. They have a baby, but it’s stillborn. They drift apart. Jean has this thing with Lucjan. He’s Polish an orphan from the Warsaw...

There’s too much football on TV. In my day it used to be highlights of Archie McPherson’s blow-away hair and sometimes Arthur Montford on a Sunday. Then we had Football Italia. Now we’ve got every game in the world all showing at the same time and billed as the biggest the best and the most important. Tickets for this match were selling for 800 Euros. John Terry, former England captain, we were told was in the stadium. I like Barcelona because...

I’ve an admission to make. I thought I’d a fair idea what a Turk was, but I looked up Caicos in the dictionary. Only it wasn’t there. Somebody’s being fiddling with the Oxford English Dictionary or I’m a bit daft. If we take away all the plausible explanations and are left with only the daft ones then it was probably me. In case we didn’t get it, where not up to speed, a black cop told Johnny Worricker (Bill Nighy) what it was all about. Turks...

Dirt Music is a disappointment. I’ll need to qualify that. I read the whole 461 pages and I wasn’t quite sure, at the end, if the plane crashed, or if Fox had hallucinated such a thing, but he’s blue and Georgie is blowing into his mouth as Jim Buckridge watches on. Dirt Music is a disappointment because it’s not Breath , Winton’s 2008 book. It’s a simple enough plot. Georgie Jutland is forty, a nurse that no longer nurses. She lives at White...

I’m not interested in trains, or cars or the latest gadgets and sadly my Japanese language skills are drawn from Mary Sanderson’s purple hair and 1981 number one hit ‘he’s my Japanese boy; he’s my Japanese boy’. But this interests me because the increasingly fast train—Shinkansen bullet train to Toyko used to take eight hours, it’s under two hours now and that time is shrinking—is a metaphor for our society. Japan’s biggest train crash, 25th...

Tuberculosis is something we don’t really need to worry about here in the West. We used to get inoculated against it at secondary school and it was a rite of passage about how big the needle was how little it hurt (ouch, ouch). There was a little BCG stamp on your shoulder that showed you were a real man, and women could be real men too, with the same little stamp on their shoulder. Tuberculosis was a thing of the past associated with tenement...

Anyone that has ever dived into my writing knows I can’t spell and often confuse breath and breathe. Breath is the stuff you breathe. The stuff of life. Bruce— ‘Pikelet’—Pike is the kind of paramedic that you’d want to turn up in an emergency. He misses nothing, the broken collar-bone of the father that has been fractured beating down the door of his boy’s room. The mother trying to concoct a story that it was an accident and her boy didn’t hang...

All Made Up is a play on words. In what can be described as a follow up to This is not about me , which took Galloway to the cusp of adolescence and won her Scottish Book of the Year. For me it was a shocking discovery, somebody that could write and was more gifted than Alice Munro—and was Scottish. Play the bagpipe music and wheel on the shortcake. The ‘villain’ was Cora, Janice’s sister, who is twenty years older than her, and I use that word...

It’s a year of anniversaries. One hundred years since the First World War and thirty years since the miners’ strike. Great Britain, an island nation, built on coal. Remember them, coal miners? Quaint little people that used to black up and work in coal mines. Seems hard to believe they existed. 84 000 of them and they had wives and families. Seventy pits. Arthur Scargill the NUM leader said the government had a hit list. The media proclaimed it...

This is one of the few films that trump the book, in this case Ken Kessey’s, and was a critical and box office success. I’ve seen it a few times and the script and the performances still shine. It’s a simple premise: Randle Patrick (Mac)McMurphy (Jack Nicholson) takes on the world, which is quite a mouthful, but he’s got quite a mouth. He’s inside for the statutory rape of a fifteen-year-old girl and other offenses, none of which he found...